In business today, “user experience” (or UX) has come to represent all of the qualities of a product or service that make it relevant or meaningful to an end-user — everything from its look and feel design to how…

One of the biggest challenges I face at Social@Ogilvy is maintaining a simultaneous focus on innovation and operationalizing proven practices. Technically you cannot do both at the same time. It’s kind of like multitasking, which is really a myth. We…

Six Sigma, Kaizen, Lean, and other variations on continuous improvement can be hazardous to your organization’s health. While it may be heresy to say this, recent evidence from Japan and elsewhere suggests that it’s time to question these methods.

Admittedly, continuous improvement once powered Japan’s economy. Japanese manufacturers in the 1950s had a reputation for poor quality, but through a culture of analytical and systematic change Japan was able to go from worst to first. Starting in the 1970s, the country’s ability to create low-cost, quality products helped them dominate key industries, such as automobiles, telecommunications, and consumer electronics. To compete with this miraculous turnaround, Western companies, starting with Motorola, began to adopt Japanese methods. Now, almost every large Western company, and many smaller ones, advocate for continuous improvement.

But what’s happened in Japan? In the past year Japan’s major electronics firms have lost an aggregated $21 billion and have been routinely displaced by competitors from China, South Korea, and elsewhere. As Fujio Ando, senior managing director at Chibagin Asset Management suggests, “Japan’s consumer electronics industry is facing defeat. “Similarly, Japan’s automobile industry has been plagued by a series of embarrassing quality problems and recalls, and has lost market share to companies from South Korea and even (gasp!) the United States.

I’ve been pondering the “truths” we hold dear and wondering whether or not the mental models we were taught in college and graduate school hold up under the changes occurring in our economy. Do the great business thinkers of the…

As the 3M and Allied Signal stories demonstrate, a leader can launch a process program and drive significant benefits. But executives can change or their attention can shift. There are always many competitors for an executive’s attention. Only when process improvement is on the top management agenda can a company make the often large investments in process redesign, information technology, training and education that are required. Senior executive knowledge of his or her company’s strategy is a key driver of the way that work should be designed or redesigned. Only senior management can resolve turf issues between departments and functions — issues which can torpedo cross-functional process improvement. Redesigning work from a customer’s point-of-view and the ongoing pursuit of operational excellence implies changes not only in IT and processes, but also in organization, attitudes, and behaviors. The biggest execution challenge is shifting the mindsets of people within the organization. Therefore, any major process improvement program must have the active engagement of the top team.

As my final sally into the intellectual capital topics introduced by Mary Adams in her book Intangible Capital I wanted to respond to one other question that Mary posed. She asked – what’s the relationship between innovation and intangible capital. My answer to that is to paraphrase Keynes by saying we’re all innovators in the long run.

In today’s economy every business is an idea business. Think about it carefully. Is there a business you can think of that isn’t constantly trying to improve its operations, cut costs, increase market share? From the most automated manufacturer to the firms that make a living spitting out ideas for other firms, every firm is in the idea business. It’s simply a matter of how the ideas are used. In many firms that would scoff at the concept that they are idea businesses, the focus of idea generation is on improving productivity and efficiency.